Website Performance
So you have a great looking website, but how do you know if its performing correctly and to its full potential?
No matter if your website is business or personal, created by a web design company or self built. It really should have good performance and be accessible to all.
Unfortunately many websites fall short in either or both of these areas. Which comes as a shock to many website owners, especially when they paid good money to have theirs professionally built, or have used one of the popular big name site builders out there.
Finding out whether your website is performant should be a priority task, but how do you benchmark a website? Also what areas of your website's performance and usability should you be looking at? Such as how does your website compare to others especially your business competitors? Does it have any issues that could be preventing it being included in search engine listings?
Now you might also be thinking how can I do all that? I don't really have the time to learn, or the extra money to spend! Plus I really don't know that much about web stuff!
Well the good news is that most of the testing is pretty straight forward to use, as well as being free!! So lets explore how to obtain a benchmark of where your website is at today.
Audit test & benchmark your website!
Learn how to run a webpage audit in the browser with Google's Lighthouse and how its scored.
Lets go find your benchmark »Understanding your Lighthouse testing results
Using these results should help you create a clear action plan of what urgent fixes or updates you might need to carry out on your website. But what do these results and actions mean?
Learn what your results mean »A roadmap to a usable business website
Even though there's not a definative checklist to the perfect website, there's' still a few common elements which are key to having a great funtioning website.
Find out how your site compares to our list »Next steps to a better website
Along with the comprehensive set of audit results you'll get using these online tools there's also further testing and steps you can do to ensure your website is performing to its best.
Checkout what further tests you can do »Safari browser users
If you are a Mac user with a Safari browser you can still use developer tools to test, audit and benchmark your website, though the devtools and the type audits available in this browser are different.
Learn how to test in your Mac browser now »Are you EAA Compliant?
On the 28th June 2025 the European Accessibility Act (EAA) which was first introduced in 2019 came into full force.
This means that anyone within, or who does business within the EU, now needs to be compliant with the law or could face prosecution.
It covers a range of products and services, including many types of online experiences such as e-commerce websites and mobile apps.
You can learn more about this in our Accessibility on the Web Sprouts of Wisdom tip.
More Online Tools for Website Testing
How about checking out your site with Google's online tools.
First check that your site is Mobile Friendly
Do you know the percentage of users that come to your site with a mobile device? Or that Google uses this as a factor for the search engine results of your site.
We also recommend checking your site out with Pagespeed Insights
This will give you an overview of areas to improve upon to provide a better service to your website customers.
Google has some great information available on how to fix common issues found with these tools, which can help you work to fix your site.
This is just the start of the free tools available to test your site, we look forward to showing you more soon.
Further Resources
JasmineWS tips
You will find as you progress through this site direct links to further information, most of which lead you to our JasmineWS Tutorial website, and its Sprouts of Wisdom tips section.
This is a growing selection of articles written by us on a variety of web related subjects, aimed at the small business owner or those starting out on their web design journey. Which we hope are also of interest and relevent to anyone who has, or works on website's.